Law Enforcement's Growing need for video storage...

Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. \

Shortly after the civil unrest that occurred in Baltimore following the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in 2015, the city soon began running low on video storage capacity for its CitiWatch surveillance network as authorities wanted to retain as much footage as they could for evidentiary purposes. In fact, according to a story published at the time by the Baltimore Sun, storage capacity for some of the city’s 700 cameras was reduced from 28 days to just three.

Of course, the CitiWatch camera network consisted largely of stationary cameras installed throughout Baltimore. However, in the wake of the Gray case and other police-involved shootings across the country, an ever increasing number of law enforcement agencies are now deploying body-worn cameras as part of an effort to increase transparency when it comes to interactions between police and the public. In fact, a survey conducted by the Major Cities Chiefs Association and Major County Sheriffs' Association in 2016, found that nearly all (95 percent) large police departments have either already outfitted officers with body cameras or plan to do so moving forward. This has subsequently increased the video storage capacity requirements of municipal, county and state governments by several orders of magnitude and some are now realizing that they don’t have the scalability necessary to meet these challenges.

Although some of the more traditional enterprise-type video storage products would give law enforcement agencies the increased capacity they need, most of them simply do not have budget for these solutions which cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Enter StorageCraft, which has created a new storage solution, “StorageCraft for Law Enforcement,” which is tailored to meet the growing storage needs of police and sheriffs’ departments at a more budget-friendly price point.

According to Shridar Subramanian, vice president marketing and product management at StorageCraft, one of the biggest things that differentiates their offering from some of the more traditional video storage solutions on the market is that they don’t require the end-user to figure out exactly how much storage they are going to need in the future ahead of time and fork out the money that goes along with that. “What we have is a very simple scale-out solution where they can actually buy only the capacity they need today and, without having to do some complex calculations or use very sophisticated formulas, they can just keep adding more loads on the fly and increasing their capacity as they start hitting the limits of their configuration today,” he says.

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